S03E11 — Dracula

SPOILER ALERT: This episode and transcript below contains major spoilers for Dracula.

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Featuring hosts Timothy Haynes, Donna Haynes, Rebekah Edwards, and T. Josiah Haynes.

Sink your teeth into this one baby listeners! This week on The Book Is Better, we tackle the granddaddy of vampire lore: Dracula. From Bram Stoker’s surprisingly Christian, diary-driven nightmare to a century of wildly different film adaptations, we debate what actually makes this story work. We cover everything from creepy castles and plague ships to tragic love retcons, over-the-top sensuality, and why Mina deserves way more respect. It’s gothic, it’s chaotic, and it proves that sometimes the scariest thing isn’t the vampire—it’s what filmmakers do to the source material.

Final Verdicts

If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, we recommend waiting to read our verdicts. (But you’re probably grown, so do what you want!)

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a slow-burn, epistolary horror rooted in faith, dread, and collective heroism, with Mina as the quiet MVP. Film adaptations trade that layered structure for spectacle, romance, and sexualized backstories, often softening the horror and sidelining the book’s moral spine.

Donna: Loved the book deeply, especially Mina’s strength, faith, and intelligence. Found most films disappointing by comparison.
– Book Score: 9.5/10
– Film Choice: Felt the 1977 BBC film was the strongest adaptation.

Rebekah: The story is brilliant, but the pacing is brutal. I appreciate the book’s ideas more than the experience of reading it.
– Book Score: 6.5/10
– Film Choice: The Coppola film was my favorite classic, but nothing beats the cometic horror adaptation Renfield.

Josiah: The book is near-masterpiece despite a bloated ending.
– Book Score: 9/10
– Film Choice: Coppola visually strong but narratively frustrating, but off the four it is the best.

Tim: Book is excellent and immersive, though overlong near the end9like four hours to long).
– Book Score: 9/10
– Film Choice: The 1977 BBC film was the best in my opinion, but Coppola film was visually impressive but morally off-putting.

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Full Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Tim: I’m so excited. I want to drink your blood. 

[00:00:04] Rebekah: I, no guys, I don’t. No. Okay. Well, I don’t know what’s happening there, but I’m pretty sure that’s not like a quote from the films or, or is the book rather are Sure. Or the films actually, they’re not 

[00:00:14] Josiah: quoting Are you books? They’re quoting our short fiction from when we were kids.

[00:00:20] Rebekah: Oh, great. Oh, we should release that as a, that’s not special. Dracula. No. 

[00:00:27] Tim: Oh. Oh dear. Dang 

[00:00:28] Rebekah: it. 

[00:00:30] Tim: My life is over. Well, I’ve always been a fan 

[00:00:33] Josiah: sucking a blood.

[00:00:55] Rebekah: Hey, welcome to the podcast today and for another Christmas [00:01:00] episode, we’re gonna be talking about Dirac. Woohoo. Listen, 

[00:01:07] Tim: we know 

[00:01:08] Rebekah: how that’s right to pick them in. That’s right. Listen, baby listener, by the time you see this, it will not be Christmas for you. It will be the middle of the season where you are like in the gym like.

[00:01:18] Rebekah: Get in school, lose some weight. You are probably on a diet right now because it’s January and you know what, you haven’t 

[00:01:25] quit 

[00:01:26] Rebekah: yet there. You haven’t quit yet because you’re killing it. And it’s still also a few weeks in too soon to quit. Um, now, two weeks from now, I don’t know what is gonna happen, but I thought, why not introduce more Christmas cheer into your life by talking about the undead?

[00:01:43] Rebekah: So that just, it seemed like a good call. So, in preparation for this episode, uh, I wanted to ask you all a fun fact. And today’s fun fact is did you have any childhood fears, [00:02:00] for instance, fearing a monster under the bed? I will go first because as soon as I read this one, I did have an answer, but no one is allowed to judge me.

[00:02:09] Rebekah: Okay. I’m say I’m pre, I’m preempting the judgments, so that’s what’s gonna happen, right? No one’s gonna judge you. 

[00:02:15] Tim: Sure. 

[00:02:16] Rebekah: Okay. I remember, and I, I apologize if I’ve mentioned this before. Um, I remember we were watching something on the Discovery Channel about giant squid, you know, giant squid that live at the bottom of oceans.

[00:02:31] Rebekah: And I got really freaked out. I don’t know how old I was, but we were living in Chester, so I had to have been at least fifth grade At the youngest. We watched this thing about giant squid. It talks about how dangerous they are and how terrifying they are and all this stuff. I went to bed. And I stayed awake, staring at my windows the whole night.

[00:02:54] Rebekah: And that happened more than one time because I was terrified that a giant squid was going to [00:03:00] come out of the Ohio River, come outta the Ohio River and come attack me in my mess. So we were a land, we were very landlock. Oh, that’s great. We just lived up against a river. But somehow in my little childhood, I just had this imagination where a giant squid was gonna come all the way from like the Pacific Ocean and find me in West Virginia.

[00:03:25] Rebekah: So that was my like most notable childhood fear. I have talked about the one where I used to sleep on my back for a long time because I did see an episode of Rescue 9 1 1, where a kid got bit in the butt by a snake, and I was afraid a snake would come in and bite me, but I thought if I sleep on my back, he cannot bite me in the butt.

[00:03:45] Rebekah: And I did not think about the fact that he could bite me on any other part of my body. So I just, it didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t put it together. You were so 

[00:03:52] Josiah: stupid. 

[00:03:54] Rebekah: I’m so sorry. 

[00:03:56] Tim: Listen, it’s not unusual mine [00:04:00] among, among many different kinds of things. I don’t think I’ve said this before, but I watched, uh, an episode of, of a soap opera that mom had been watching.

[00:04:11] Tim: It’s the edge of Night doesn’t exist anymore. Um, and I remember there was a, a woman who wanted to be involved with one of the male characters, and so she was going to hide in his bed and she went to hide in his bed and a killer came to kill the man. And because there was a body in the bed, he killed her instead.

[00:04:38] Tim: And so from that point on. I was traumatized. And it’s like, okay, I can’t sleep in a bed without covers on and things like that because they’re gonna protect me from the knife that stabbed the person. So, see you. You not the only one. 

[00:04:53] Rebekah: Thank you. Listen, it is important that we like pay attention to what little children are watching.

[00:04:57] Rebekah: Little children are crazy people. Mm-hmm. [00:05:00] 

[00:05:00] Josiah: Oh, it’s okay. Everyone’s gonna be scared of something. Let them be scared of something. 

[00:05:04] Rebekah: Mm. 

[00:05:05] Tim: Yeah. 

[00:05:06] Rebekah: You know what I’m gonna put on that movie where Leonardo DiCaprio gets basically eaten by a bear, and I’m gonna show that to my kids every night before bed. And I’m gonna be like, my brother said you had to be afraid of something.

[00:05:16] Rebekah: So I chose what you should be afraid of. 

[00:05:18] Josiah: That’s right. Choose. 

[00:05:19] Donna: But the good thing is, after you encounter the bear, you can hollow him out. And take out all his innards and then you can sleep in him for warmth if you’re in Arctic. Tundra. Yeah. That’s, 

[00:05:30] Tim: that’s Star Wars. That revet scene, by the way, is an excellently done?

[00:05:37] Tim: Very. Yeah. Why are so good? Yeah. Why are we talking about Dracula? I wondered how they did that. 

[00:05:40] Josiah: Talking about, 

[00:05:43] Tim: we’re talking about fears. 

[00:05:44] Rebekah: I want my kids, sorry. I don’t want my kids to be afraid of vampires. ’cause those are real. So I’ll, I’ll make them be afraid of bears, which are not real. 

[00:05:54] Donna: Yes. 

[00:05:54] Josiah: You know, I was like 

[00:05:55] Rebekah: birds.

[00:05:56] Josiah: I’m a a paranoid, paranoid person. And the [00:06:00] form that took when I was a little boy up through high school for sure was that I would just be in bed and I would think, yeah, there’s a good possibility there’s someone hiding behind my bed ready to kill me right now. 

[00:06:15] Rebekah: Oh. 

[00:06:15] Josiah: And I’d just be thinking about that all night and I’d go to bed, I’d wake up in the morning, think.

[00:06:21] Josiah: There certainly could have been someone there and they just didn’t do it. 

[00:06:23] Donna: So my family, except all my family older than me, except for one cousin, is dead. They’re all gone. So I can tell things that a few years ago, my mother would’ve hunted me down and beat me to death for saying out loud. So nobody’s gonna beat 

[00:06:44] Rebekah: you to death now?

[00:06:45] Donna: Um, nope. Nope. And, uh, I have to just be very honest with you, just over the top of my monitor, I’m looking at my mom’s ashes in an urn and I’m still kind of afraid [00:07:00] to say this. Uh, okay. So when I was little, we lived in a rural town. Um. 

[00:07:11] Rebekah: You did 

[00:07:11] Donna: in fact, and we worked, we weren’t beside the river, but we were close to a river.

[00:07:17] Donna: Okay. So, oh my gosh. Were you afraid of a Giants would do? No. But in the spring we would have mice problems just in the area, like not just our house or whatever. And one night my dad had his foot out from under the covers and a mouse bit his toe. And somebody was stupid enough to tell me that. And so I had a mortal fear of mice.

[00:07:48] Donna: And one Saturday morning I was in elementary school, my brother rushes into my bedroom, shakes me awake, and says, dad [00:08:00] got the rat. Okay. My dad had a mouse trap out that he had been trying to catch this one. I say mouse. I don’t think any of them were huge rodents. Okay. Um, but we said rat that, and he said, come on.

[00:08:18] Donna: And he like, drug me outta bed. We run outside our house. I see my dad running across the living room with a broomstick in his hand, swinging it wildly cursing and swearing. He had caught the mouse in the trap by the tail, so it wasn’t dead. He let the mouse go because in his vengeance he wanted to kill him and he chased him through the house and smashed him in the hallway.

[00:08:57] Donna: And my mom wanted to kill him [00:09:00] at that point because of what he’d 

[00:09:02] Tim: done. And you think cartoons are completely unrealistic? 

[00:09:07] Donna: Yeah. I will never forget in my life. I mean, if I’m an old a hundred year old woman in a home with dementia, I will remember my dad running across the living room swinging the brooms.

[00:09:21] Rebekah: That is, that is truly a memory for the ages. Well, with that delightful list of horror stories, Josiah, why don’t you tell us what happens in this horror story? 

[00:09:33] Josiah: Well, in Bram Stoker’s original novel, uh, he tells it in an epistolary format, which is kinda like book found footage through various diary entries, letters and articles.

[00:09:45] Josiah: Bram Stoker shares with the reader about a lawyer who travels to Sylvania in the Carpathian Mountains to sell Count Dracula. Carfax Abbey in London, this lawyer, Jonathan Harker, slowly learns Dracula is [00:10:00] something evil, perhaps a werewolf or a vampire. Harker is trapped in the castle, haunted by three vampiric women, and terrified by strange goings on like Dracula, crawling in lizard fashion on the outside wall.

[00:10:20] Josiah: I believe Harker leaps from the castle, a river, and is nursed to health. And Budapest slowly making his way back to London. Um, I say I believe because I did change that in my play ’cause I thought that was a little silly, uh, spoiler alert. But, uh, board the Demeter Dracula makes it to London. First he bites Harkers friend, the sleepwalking innocent Lucy Weiner Lucy’s friends, including Harkers love Mina Murray, Madam Mina, get together to figure out the mystery of Lucy’s demise and other strange happenings.

[00:10:58] Josiah: Lucy’s friend and brief [00:11:00] prospective fiance, Dr. John Seward runs an asylum where Renfield is a patient. Renfield is a servant of Dracula. He’s insane, but is he, Renfield goes back and forth between helping Dracula and feeling guilt and kind of helping Lucy’s friends. I I had to change that in my play too, ’cause it’s hard to really say how he really helps the friends, but he tries, uh, Dr.

[00:11:28] Josiah: John Seward. Who, uh, the people in the book keep calling Friend John. Yeah. So friend John also calls to London the eccentric Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, who is familiar with wild scientific theories like vam, purism hypnotics, and blood transfusion. Uh, with the help of Van Helsing, they put Vampire Lucy to eternal rest.

[00:11:54] Josiah: But Madam Mina has already been bitten. Long story short, they [00:12:00] hypnotized Mina using her psychic connection with Dracula to chase him back to Transylvania Van Helsing and Mina beat the count to the castle and Van Helsing kills the three vampire women, the men harker, Dr. Seward, a nobleman named Arthur Homewood, who was going to marry Lucy and a wealthy Texan named Quincy Morris.

[00:12:22] Josiah: He’s the comic relief, uh, those men, instead of going to the castle, they intercept some Ramani, uh, literally specifically they’re the ques, uh, who are transporting Dracula before they can reach the castle. They fight the enthralled Romani and Quincy Morris stabs the sleeping Dracula through the heart with not a steak, but his big Bowie knife.

[00:12:48] Josiah: But Quincy is mortally wounded by the shakes. Parker and Mina are happily married in the final chapter, which is a time jump reminiscing about their amazing friends and the vague, crazy [00:13:00] memory of a weirdo Transylvanian spreading plague across London. 

[00:13:04] Tim: I really enjoyed the, the part of the book that talked about the, the relationship.

[00:13:11] Tim: Those men, they had been on adventures before, which is why, you know, Quincy is part of the group. He was really kind of the leader. Um, that’s what wealthy people would’ve done in that, in that time, they would’ve gone on adventures big hunts to Africa or this, that and the other. So 

[00:13:31] Donna: you don’t get that in the movies.

[00:13:32] Donna: They, they don’t really develop that part. And I understand why, but I think it’s, I do think it’s a fascinating, 

[00:13:40] Tim: it is also why, um, Jeremy Clarkson’s, uh, show. When they, when they made their own show, it was called the Grand Tour because the grand tour was what people would do. They would go around the world, they would have adventures, and they would do things.

[00:13:57] Tim: And so that’s where that name came from. [00:14:00] Even 

[00:14:00] Rebekah: this was released in the late 19th century. And I, I obviously, there’s a lot of things that you wouldn’t say today in a book, um, about women. But I also thought in the book, it was really interesting and at least I’ll talk about this a little bit, but like in the films that I watched, it did not feel this way necessarily.

[00:14:18] Rebekah: But I also thought that it was cool that Mina was considered a really valuable, like she had a lot of valuable information. She was given a lot of agency and I think that that’s kind of cool, especially considering the time. 

[00:14:33] Josiah: And I don’t think she was sexualized in the book either. It wasn’t her sexuality that was valuable.

[00:14:38] Josiah: It was her contributions as a human. 

[00:14:41] Tim: Then Helsing says she has, she has a man brain with, with a woman’s sensibility. Yeah. When the woman, I thought that was hilarious. Hilarious. You might not have 

[00:14:51] Josiah: very progressive for the 

[00:14:52] Tim: time. Might not have wanted to say, but it did. It did speak of her in a very progressive way and actually through the different [00:15:00] films that we watched, and we actually watched a few different ones.

[00:15:03] Tim: Um, one of the things that kept coming up to me was agency, you know, in, in the novel, Mina was a very smart, very wise woman. Um, in some of them, she’s, uh. You know, I, I watched one of them, one of the Hammer films and just a tiny little tidbit there. Um, when Renfield is a, is attacking, uh, Mina, she’s slinging her arms, but none of them ever hit him.

[00:15:33] Tim: It’s like she’s, she’s not even trying to keep him from choking her to death. She’s just screaming. 

[00:15:38] Rebekah: Well, I wanted to kind of explain the format of this episode’s gonna be very different from our typical ones because they’re, this is one of the most obviously prolific, um, works that’s been made into film.

[00:15:50] Rebekah: I mean, if you look up like list of all Dracula movies, there’s like a ton, I think a Christmas carol’s probably the only thing maybe that’s had more, [00:16:00] uh, adaptation. So, um, spoiler alert, obviously we’re spoiling or did spoil the book of Dracula, which you knew. However, we are going to discuss five different films.

[00:16:10] Rebekah: So here’s the spoiler alert for those. We’re gonna talk about the Lago film. Nosferatu, the 1922 silent film version, uh, from Stoker’s Dracula, which is the one from the nineties with, uh, directed by Coppola featuring Keanu Re Reeves and Gary Oldham. We’re gonna talk about the 1990 or 1977 BBC TV film, and then Renfield, which is not a direct adaptation, and we’ll talk a little bit more about why, and we’ll kind of explain to you as we go through these, the person who is responsible for watching it, we’ll give you like a breakdown of like, why is this one that we chose.

[00:16:44] Rebekah: Um, some of the ones we didn’t cover but are like the most kind of notable, kind of oldest to newest. There’s a lot of older ones too, but the West Craven Dracula 2000 Van Helsing in 2020 or 2004, the last voyage of the [00:17:00] demeanor was released in 2023, which like takes that, which is discussed briefly in the book.

[00:17:05] Rebekah: It’s just based on one chapter. There is another Nosferatu that was released in 2024. We specifically didn’t cover that, at least in my head, because of the sexual content, it is ridiculous. Now, IMDB calls it moderate, but I read over what it is and I didn’t feel like it was very moderate. Um, there was also a Hungarian film called The Death of Dracula that was released this year, 2025.

[00:17:29] Rebekah: And in the last month or so, Dracula also called Dracula A Love Tale, and in some countries renamed Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Was it a French Italian film that was released just this year? Um, there will also be another Dracula film coming out. Mom, did you say it was February, March, something like that? 

[00:17:48] Donna: Yeah, February 6th, actually, the day 

[00:17:50] Rebekah: before my birthday.

[00:17:51] Rebekah: Oh, wow. So yeah, we might even, uh, watch that and come back and do a quick mini review that we released just on our discord. Um, where we talk about [00:18:00] like, our feelings on that. So, format of this episode, we’re gonna talk a little bit about the book, a little bit of trivia about Dracula and, and all of those kinds of things.

[00:18:08] Rebekah: And then each of us will just present one or two films and just kind of talk about our thoughts and we’ll discuss. We’re not gonna go through individual changes like super granular through every film, but we’ll just talk about what they changed, what we liked, our general thoughts on it, and uh, and then we’ll end with a little bit of.

[00:18:26] Rebekah: Fun mini game stuff. All right, mom, do you wanna get us into the book trivia stuff? 

[00:18:30] Donna: Woo-hoo. Yeah. So book release was May of 1897. 

[00:18:37] Tim: That’s quite some time ago, I thought 

[00:18:39] Donna: was before ago, before you were born, 

[00:18:40] Tim: dad. 

[00:18:41] Rebekah: Barely. But yes. 

[00:18:43] Donna: Love it. Uh, the book rating for Dracula on Good Reads is 4.02 out of five, and that’s 1.4 million ratings.

[00:18:53] Tim: Well, Dracula is the seventh of 18. Published books by Brim [00:19:00] Stoker. Uh, reviews were mixed when the novel was initially released in 1897. Some loved the level of fright while others said that the horror level was much too high. In the 20th century, the novel was thought to be the most influential book of gothic fiction, the pinnacle, if you will, of vampire fiction.

[00:19:20] Rebekah: Okay. So 18 published books. It was the seventh 

[00:19:24] Tim: 18 

[00:19:24] Rebekah: published books. I just looked up the list. I recognize zero of the other books that he has written. I, there’s one that’s like a short story thing, Dracula’s Guest and other weird stories. But like I literally, it’s so interesting that he wrote something that would become this wildly popular for so long.

[00:19:45] Tim: Dracula’s Guest is reported to be either a first draft or concept for Dracula, or the first chapter, and it was actually used as a story and there’s actually a [00:20:00] film. One of the films is based on that piece. 

[00:20:04] Rebekah: This was. 32 years after the end of the Civil War, 

[00:20:09] Donna: it’s hard to put yourself back. Okay, where were we in the world?

[00:20:12] Donna: And anyway, back to some vampire lore. Uh, the sunlight being fatal to vampires doesn’t come from stoker’s novel, although it is common in a lot of films about Dracula. It was first brought into the lore in the 1922 silent film. Nosferatu in the novel. Uh, Stoker uses sunlight to weaken them temporarily, but not like that they can be out in and and they don’t glimmer like Edward and family.

[00:20:44] Donna: So just wanna throw that in, right. Uh, in fact, Stoker gives vampires, uh, uh, like a convoluted set of rules, including specific time of day transition. Like there’s sunrise, sunset at noon [00:21:00] when they can change form, uh, from dust or mist or bat wolf or even like a ray of moonlight. So, um, he, he had some very interesting parts in there of daytime, but he didn’t make sunlight fatal to them, so I thought he kind of expanded what, what sunlight meant.

[00:21:20] Josiah: I was just gonna say, getting ahead of myself, that Coppola’s, 1994 Dracula is probably the only film I’ve ever seen Come close. To exploring the idea of Dracula operating in daylight and being weaker, but not being like really harmed by the sunlight. 

[00:21:40] Rebekah: Yeah. Now call it me watching too much twilight. But this was an interesting experience.

[00:21:47] Rebekah: You do watch too much twilight. It’s so beautiful and wonderful.

[00:21:54] Rebekah: Spider Monkey. I gotta show you something amazing. Hang on, hang on. 

[00:21:57] Tim: Wait a minute. Was that, was that an [00:22:00] imitation of the werewolf? 

[00:22:00] Josiah: That’s an imitation of people watching Twilight. 

[00:22:05] Rebekah: Look at this beautiful gift I got for Christmas. It says Home sweet

[00:22:13] Josiah: Miss the 

[00:22:13] Rebekah: tree. I have made it. It’s beautiful faded. 

[00:22:16] Donna: I love it. 

[00:22:17] Rebekah: Anyway, this was just an interesting exploration of me learning like what actual vampire lore is like what original vampire lore? Stoker’s book was the originator of three main ones. Uh, that vampires have to be invited into the home, which is a huge theme of, uh, most vampire stuff like traditional vampire stuff.

[00:22:42] Rebekah: Uh, they must sleep on earth from their homeland. 

[00:22:45] Tim: That’s an important one. 

[00:22:47] Rebekah: Yeah. And then they show no reflection in mirrors, in ancient folklores believes that the mirror reflects the human soul of which stoker’s vampires had none. And that kind of goes back into like Native Americans, like didn’t want their [00:23:00] picture being taken ’cause they didn’t want their soul being captured.

[00:23:02] Rebekah: And like, yeah, there are many like traditions that follow that same kind of thing. So I thought that that was really interesting and it was fun to like learn, you know, what was introduced by stoker, what was established and what kind of changes. 

[00:23:15] Donna: Interestingly enough, you know, the twi we mentioned twilight in jest there, they don’t use a lot of traditional van.

[00:23:22] Donna: He makes jokes about that. Yeah, we can, oh yeah, that’s not true. True. We can go out. But they do use the, the soul issue that, that is all through that whole series of books. Where they don’t, they show, show think they have a soul or is their soul worth anything or whatever. I think that’s interesting that, that, that is a.

[00:23:41] Donna: A theme. 

[00:23:41] Tim: There were some progenitors to Stoker’s Dracula, uh, that came before John William Polo Doris the Vampire from 1819, A tale of an aristocratic vamp with powers of seduction. Sheridan Lenu [00:24:00] wrote Carmela in 1872, not too very long before, with the main character as a lesbian vampire who can transform into a cat.

[00:24:09] Tim: Stoker’s work was compared to villains in the Italian by Anne Radcliffe, which was written in 1796. The Monk written by Matthew Gregory Lewis, also published in 1796, and nobody said this, but another monster had already been created in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in 1818. 

[00:24:30] Rebekah: Mm-hmm. Which we will be discussing pretty soon.

[00:24:33] Rebekah: Actually. 

[00:24:33] Josiah: I’ve heard it said that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Was kind of the pinnacle and progenitor of gothic science fiction. Whereas Dracula was the progenitor of gothic supernatural fantasy. Uh, the inspiration for the titular character Dracula is most commonly believed to be Henry Irving, an actor who portrayed the character Shylock [00:25:00] in a production of the Merchant of Venice at the Lies team theater.

[00:25:04] Josiah: Stoker’s Review of Irving’s performance stated that he was a wonderful impression of a dead man Fictitiously alive. With eyes like cinders of glowing red from out the marble face. Bram Stoker and Henry Irving somehow became friends after the review was published and Irving hired his new friend Yes. To serve as business manager at the theater.

[00:25:28] Donna: And you recognize the Lym Theater? Is that previews a lot of the stuff we’ve covered When it previews in London it it preview pre The premieres, sorry. When it premieres it’s at the Lyce. So I thought that was pretty cool. That Stoker, that we have lore, the that, that goes all the way back. I think that’s pretty awesome.

[00:25:48] Rebekah: So Mom, tell us about which movie this is, why you picked it, and then tell us more about like your experience watching. 

[00:25:55] Donna: Well, I wanted to watch it because my brother was a [00:26:00] huge fan of old classic monsters. So Bella Lagosi is the pin ultimate actor. To bring Dracula to life as I read about him, actually, it was fascinating to read.

[00:26:16] Donna: He would walk around the set off camera just saying, I am Dracula. And in the film, which is a black and white from uh, uh, 1931, he would walk around the set perfecting his, his accent and how he was gonna portray this. And it was wild how many things I read about the actors around him and the cast or crew that, you know, he took this so seriously.

[00:26:45] Donna: He was so into this and it, it launched his career into the very creepy, ominous character. He played several other roles that [00:27:00] were, were similarly, like thrillers or, or things like that. And his, uh, he also brought the. The haunting stare of Dracula. He brought that to life on the screen. And so the story actually begins with Renfield going to Castle Dracula to finalize his plans to move to Carfax Abbey.

[00:27:24] Donna: Uh, and then once he’s there, he quickly, he turns Lucy into a vampire. That’s like one of the first things he does when he gets to the city. She roams around stealing children, killing children. The film, it is not graphic at all. Like when you see Dracula going to bite or any, uh, even when Mina goes after John, uh, John in this iteration, it’s not Jonathan Har, it’s John Harker.

[00:27:51] Donna: You only see them coming up close to the person’s neck. So, um, it’s a very clean film as far as, and you never 

[00:27:59] Tim: even [00:28:00] see his teeth. 

[00:28:01] Donna: No, they don’t, they don’t show sharp teeth either. Um, so. Then after Lucy’s been turned, the count focuses attention on Mina. Um, Dr. Van Helsing is called in at that point by Mina’s dad, who is Dr.

[00:28:19] Donna: Seward. Dr. Seward’s actually the, uh, head of the sanitarium where Renfield becomes a, is a patient and he calls Dr. Van Helsingin to, uh, diagnose Lucy’s failing health because they can see, he can see his daughters getting weaker and then he realizes the true identity of Dracula and sets out what Dr.

[00:28:44] Donna: Seward and John Harker to defeat him. So that’s how they changed the book around. You’ve got some basic characters there, uh, but the film does turn a lot of this around. The count speaks very little. He does not have a lot [00:29:00] of dialogue. Like we saw in, in a couple of the other things, we watched a lot of stairs.

[00:29:06] Donna: I mean, it’s, it’s a lot of stairs, I’m telling you. Uh, so there’s no Quincy either. He’s gone, Renfield, uh, is dressed in just normal street clothes and he kind roams freely through the house. I think there’s one time that he gets outta control and they take him and, uh, lock him up because he’s, he’s getting a little frantic and crazy.

[00:29:29] Josiah: But isn’t Renfield basically filling Harper’s role? In little go see film. 

[00:29:35] Tim: Yes. I, I And 

[00:29:37] Donna: he, I kind of think so. 

[00:29:38] Tim: Yeah, they combine the two. He, he plays Renfield who has the mental problems, who is part of the book, but he’s also rolled into Harker, who is the one who went to Sylvania. And 

[00:29:50] Donna: yeah, so John Harker in this film is literally Lucy’s fiance and concerned for her, uh, and [00:30:00] kind of oblivious and very, very skeptical of everything that Van Helsing wants to do.

[00:30:05] Donna: And it, it’s kind of an odd, odd thing, and I get into some of that, why I think that is in a moment. Dracula never blinks his eyes on camera. And this was a huge thing for Le, they used it throughout his career and all. Anytime you see him, there’s never a blink, which kind of. Ramps up the creepiness of the stair.

[00:30:26] Donna: There was a plan initially for Universal to like sink a massive amount of money into this film adaptation. And make it as close to Stoker’s novel as they could. Then the market crashed in 1929 and Universal decided to stray away from that because they didn’t know if it would be wise at the time. So they adapted the film instead from a Hamilton Dean stage play that Lugo had also starred in as the Count.

[00:30:57] Donna: Uh, Edward Van Sloan also [00:31:00] reprised in the film as Van Helsing. He had been in the play and Dr. Seward was also played by the same person in both stage play and film. Uh, was played by Herbert Bunston. So the film’s incredibly short. It’s an hour and 14 minutes long. The focus was on LAI’s portrayal and a lot of the film is his haunting gaze.

[00:31:22] Donna: I mean, I was surprised how many times. He, you see him going and it’s, and 

[00:31:31] Josiah: he was pregnant, audio only listener, but it was a lot. She’s making a stare that is like Bella la as Dracula. I think this is the first of many examples of, for no reason at all these adaptations switch Mina and Lucy. I don’t understand it ’cause there’s basically not a Lucy in this, right?

[00:31:54] Josiah: There’s not a Lucy. Character from the novel, but Mina’s role is called Lucy. 

[00:31:59] Donna: [00:32:00] Well, Mina is Dr. Seward’s daughter. I mean, they switch a lot of that flip, a lot of it around. But Lucy is bitten first. Like she is transformed first and there, Lucy lives 

[00:32:10] Josiah: longer. 

[00:32:11] Donna: Uh, I don’t think they really resolve Lucy’s.

[00:32:14] Donna: There’s a lot of stuff not resolved. I’ll tell you the play, the movie was horrible. It wasn’t, it wasn’t fleshed out well. There were so many missing pieces to it. The, the acting was awful. Mina and John. Well, one, they have no chemistry, but he’s kind of a dilly. He’s, he’s just a very, uh, a shallow, he’s very, they’re shallow characterizations.

[00:32:41] Donna: He’s 

[00:32:41] Tim: very, he’s very unobservant. 

[00:32:43] Donna: Yeah. Um, he’s, 

[00:32:44] Tim: he’s kind of like a male Lucy. Really? It’s like, ah, he’s just kind of flighty. 

[00:32:50] Donna: Yeah. And, uh, and so she, there’s a scene where she sits on the, uh, out on the balcony of their, of the sanitarium, which [00:33:00] is also their home. And she has fully become vampiric at this point.

[00:33:05] Donna: Like it’s, she’s been with Dracula enough, she’s wanting to bite him and go after him, and she gets the creepy stare. And he’s oblivious to anything that’s going on. It’s, it’s very, just very uncomfortably strange. Then I read that David Manners, who played John John Harker in the film, he reportedly, uh, stated like in interviews and, and things post-production, that the whole thing was a, a mess.

[00:33:34] Donna: He said the director was so unfocused and uninterested in the film at the point where they finally started shooting it. Um, the whole cast was like that. He and Mina’s, uh, actress, the actress who portrayed her, they were cut up and joke around so much on set. People would get very distracted and frustrated by it, and he said, uh, the only one serious.

[00:33:59] Donna: In the [00:34:00] cast was Lago and he was known to be like a, a total focus professional in most of what he did, and he carried that through there. But, but, um, David Manor said the rest of it, it was almost like a joke. And I, I read several other notes about that. And so I think between the d between it being the beginning of the depression and other things going on, they wanted to go ahead and do it, but the whole thing just kind of fell apart and you see it in the acting.

[00:34:32] Donna: So 

[00:34:32] Josiah: as far as Al Go goes, has anyone’s seen that Tim Burton film? Ed Wood? 

[00:34:40] Tim: Yes. 

[00:34:40] Josiah: I was a big, big fan of that. I’ve never seen, it was one of my favorite Tim Burton movies where Johnny Depp plays this BB grade horror film director from the fifties. And kind of the heart of the film is that he has this.

[00:34:55] Josiah: Complicated relationship with a late in life. Bella Lago, [00:35:00] uh, played by Oscar nominated Martin Landau got an Oscar nomination for playing Bella Lago in this film. It was kind of funny and tragic and heartwarming and exploitative all at the same time. Kinda like a nuanced reading of Greatest Showman where PT Barnum, you know, has all of these freaks in his freak show.

[00:35:22] Josiah: And it’s kind of a mixture of, is he exploiting them for his own profit at the, but at the same time giving them an opportunity to control the narrative around them and being control of when people laugh at them. If Greatest Showman were a better movie, it would have a similar nuance that Ed Wood has to, uh, ed Wood and Belle LAI’s relationship.

[00:35:43] Josiah: But I think it’s a very interesting addition to. I don’t wanna say an understanding ’cause it is, it’s dramatized, but basically an understanding of where Bella Lago ended his life. 

[00:35:55] Tim: He is the consummate. Dracula because he did the first [00:36:00] one. He did not reprise his role as Dracula for a very long time, and he only reprised it twice.

[00:36:10] Tim: One of them was in a parody type movie, uh, earlier than Ed Wood, but he had some difficulty with the studio and they, uh, they cast another actor when they decided to do the next Dracula. Um, he did, he did continue to work. Um, he was in, uh, murder in the Ru morgue and some other kinds of Ed Growin Poe things.

[00:36:35] Tim: Uh, but. But he wasn’t Dracula again for a very long time. 

[00:36:39] Donna: He had a pretty decent body of work, but I did, uh, the little bit I got into LAI’s life. He had, he also had kind of some unfortunate things happen to him throughout the course, and one of the roles he took, he agreed to like a hundred dollars a week and was, which was hugely underpaid for other [00:37:00] people in the cast.

[00:37:00] Donna: But he just wanted to work. He just, he just wanted to act. And so I, I kind of felt like his life was kind of a series of unfortunate events. Just 

[00:37:09] Tim: he played opposite. Yeah. Boris Karloff, who became, uh, Boris, took the, took the role of Frankenstein, which Lagosi didn’t want. So the monster of Frankenstein, excuse me.

[00:37:23] Tim: Um, and then they later played opposite each other in one of. In one of the Monster films, and apparently LA made half of what the other actor made. So it, it’s kind of, it is kind of tragic that he’s the one who kind of set the bar for, and we still use several of those things. Um, for, for Draculas, 

[00:37:50] Donna: uh, it released on February 12th, 1931 in New York, and then February 14th, 1931, the rest of the US [00:38:00] Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 96.

[00:38:02] Donna: So the Worldwide Box office was 1.4 million. Uh, their budget was 341,000. So it was a, a, an initial success for them. Um, it’s that just even, I mean, even in my head thinking that we’re in depression era, the beginning of the Depression, the first few years. It still sounds like a lot like, but people were still going out to see it.

[00:38:29] Donna: Maybe it’s one of those, we’ve gotta do something for leisure. I mean, maybe it’s just the, the outcome of that where you would be willing to do it. So it was pretty cool. And then, uh, one thing I did note that I thought was interesting, Dracula’s Castle was a painting on glass in front of the camera, and then they took a real coach and drove it past the camera, traveling across the road in one of the, the big scenes [00:39:00] of, of, of their movement across the country.

[00:39:04] Donna: So I thought that was kind of interesting. So, um, I, I’m glad I, I’m glad I picked it. Um, it does remind you that things that we remember from childhood are usually much smaller. Do you ever go back to somewhere? You go back to somewhere you lived or somewhere you visited, and you’re like, was it that little?

[00:39:26] Donna: I think that like, like places and, and events and stuff. And I, so I thought, um, but it was a, it was a good experience watching it. It was fun. 

[00:39:35] Rebekah: All right. What was the next film we covered? 

[00:39:39] Josiah: Of course, we’re gonna do the No Ferrato 1922 silent film. 

[00:39:44] Rebekah: Of course. 

[00:39:45] Josiah: Yes. Perhaps the first Major Dracula adaptation, though it was unauthorized, it wasn’t officially legally a Dracula adaptation.

[00:39:53] Josiah: Uh, there might’ve been earlier ones. I think there lost media, but th this was either the first, or at least the first [00:40:00] surviving, or at least the first Major Dracula adaptation because there were lots of legal problems with adapting the source material. There are gonna be a lot more differences and similarities.

[00:40:13] Josiah: So, so I thought that I would cover the similarities. Between the novel and the film for this one. 

[00:40:19] Rebekah: Okay. I would also love to hear, I’ve never seen this one, so I would also love to hear what they do end up making the film be about like a one to 2 cents plot, if you don’t mind. 

[00:40:28] Josiah: Well, there’s a normal young guy who sells a house to a count in the Carpathian Mountains.

[00:40:34] Josiah: Uh, the Vampire named Count or lock. He’s not named Nosferatu Terrorizes, the normal people in their homeland, which is Germany, not England. There’s a Renfield. Oh, type. Yeah. Oh yeah. Well, it’s a German film. It’s all okay. It’s all, all German. 

[00:40:53] Rebekah: That was the Y 

[00:40:54] Josiah: There’s a Renfield type character who serves the Vampire.

[00:40:59] Josiah: I don’t think he [00:41:00] died in the movie. I think he lives to the end, unlike in the book. 

[00:41:03] Rebekah: Okay. 

[00:41:04] Josiah: And there’s a Van Helsing type character who basically fills that same Gandalf role coming in and guiding them as the old man. There’s a doomed woman. There’s a Mina type character named Ellen, who, the main character guy, the Harker Standin he loves.

[00:41:22] Josiah: And Mina does play a direct role in the vampire’s destruction. Um, it is a little more regressive than the novel because, uh, she basically tempts him with his, with her innocence in so that he sucks her blood for so long that he doesn’t notice the sun coming up. And then the sun comes out and kills him.

[00:41:48] Josiah: And that is the first film portrayal of sunlight hurting or, and or killing a vampire. So Nosferatu invented that, and it did stick around the big, [00:42:00] big, big changes, not just like changing the names of people in places. The big changes, I would say. They put a lot of emphasis on the demeanor. Stand in. It’s like an hour and 20 minute movie.

[00:42:12] Josiah: There’s a lot of time they spend on the sea. I was, I was watching it. It was, it was hard to get totally invested in a silent film just ’cause my palette is not a hundred years old and it is tough to enjoy silent films. But, uh, in my head most of what I remember is being on the sea. ’cause I think there was the demeanor and then I think at the end there’s another ship.

[00:42:37] Josiah: Couldn’t, couldn’t keep track of what was happening there. Uh, very confusing. There’s a little more of no Nosferatu spreading plague across Germany. So I think in, in the novel, Dracula is biting more people than just Lucy and Mina, but it’s kind of just mentioned in newspaper articles here and there, but there’s a whole montage that [00:43:00] really focuses on it in the nose Ferra two movie.

[00:43:02] Josiah: Mm-hmm. I heard one person talk about how the Spanish flu would, would’ve been like two to four years prior. 

[00:43:13] Rebekah: Yeah, it ended in 1919. 

[00:43:15] Josiah: Yeah, I think it was like 18 and 19 as a Spanish flu. So this film came out just a couple years after Spanish flu ripped through Europe. So, 

[00:43:24] Rebekah: and they used plague as a theme.

[00:43:26] Tim: Hey, it would be much, much like one of the films that came out. Just prior to the COVID, uh, pandemic. So yeah, 

[00:43:36] Rebekah: the one we watched mm-hmm. The second month of COVID and went is what, what is this? Sorry. Right. 

[00:43:42] Tim: This it’s, 

[00:43:42] Rebekah: yeah, this wasn’t intentional. Okay. Sorry, I can’t get too far into that ’cause I’ll 

[00:43:46] Josiah: Yeah.

[00:43:48] Josiah: Very odd. But, um, yeah, a lot more emphasis on the plague being spread, which might, may have been, because it would’ve been very familiar to Germans in [00:44:00] 1922, and they would’ve all sympathized with, oh wow, Nosferatu is super evil. He’s doing that thing that we all hate. But, uh, a lot of it’s just simplification.

[00:44:11] Josiah: The guy does go to the Carpathian Mountains to sell the house across the street from him. By the way, it’s not like some Abey in the city. It’s the hou the Harker stand-in sells the Dracula stand-in the house across the street from him. 

[00:44:25] Tim: Okay. Yeah, totally. Wow. It would’ve been hard to get a realtor then.

[00:44:30] Donna: Is there ever understanding of why he looks the way 

[00:44:35] Josiah: he does? No, he just looked like a rat bat. Yeah, he’s disgusting, which is not from the novel. In the novel. He’s an aristocrat. 

[00:44:42] Tim: One of the things that that comes from Nosferatu, that, that carries through most of the films though, is the long fingernails, and those were part of the character of Nosferatu.

[00:44:53] Tim: They were not part of Bella Laci’s Dracula, 

[00:44:56] Donna: but Edward had beautifully manicured fingernails. Of course, anybody [00:45:00] 

[00:45:01] Josiah: skin Dracula in the novel has a big bushy white mustache. Uh, which I think is funny. Yeah. And so it’s, it’s fun to see these different interpretations. There was a, some almost retroactively uncomfortable thoughts of whether Nosferatu was designed as a Jewish stereotype in 1920s Germany.

[00:45:25] Tim: Oh, oh wow. Perhaps. 

[00:45:29] Josiah: Uh, so that, that was, that’s part of the discussion nowadays. 

[00:45:33] Tim: Stoker’s widow was very insistent about them, about the fact that they had taken his work and she won the court case. And the court, in the court case, all copies of it were supposed to be destroyed. 

[00:45:48] Josiah: Wow. Hmm. That’s crazy. I mean, it was, it was very cinematic for its time.

[00:45:54] Josiah: It had a lot of iconic shots of Nosferatu with his fingers out. [00:46:00] Uh, no. Oh, the shadow of No, the no. And I say no. Ferra too. That’s his species not his name. 

[00:46:06] Rebekah: Is that like stance from this movie? Is that the first thing that like introduced that because that’s become like a, a thing? 

[00:46:13] Josiah: Mm-hmm. 

[00:46:14] Donna: Yeah. With him? 

[00:46:15] Rebekah: Yeah.

[00:46:15] Donna: His 

[00:46:16] Josiah: hands out. I think that, I don’t know. It’s a blinking, you miss it thing in the novel. Did you all catch when Nosferatu was mentioned in the book? I think that Harker is talking about all of the folklore that he experienced on the way up to Castle Dracula. Oh. And they’re like, yeah, they call him aro Lock or a Nosferatu, or, I think, I think it means vampire, but I think that nosferatu the word, it’s unclear on the etymology.

[00:46:47] Josiah: I, I read, I saw one video talking about how it’s not a, a transylvanian, it’s not like a Hungarian word. It’s, uh, but Bram Stoker might have read it in an [00:47:00] essay that incorrectly said that Nosferatu was a word for something like a vampire. Very, very cinematic. Very iconic. It was difficult to, I mean, like mom said, with the Lago film, the characters are just so over the top.

[00:47:14] Josiah: And you know, for Nosferatu it was interesting visually, but for the human characters, they were just so over the top to the point of realism. And, uh, yeah, I, I did not necessarily enjoy most of the film. The, the best parts were just like the Lago film. The best parts were the shots of Nosferatu being weird, 

[00:47:41] Tim: except, can you imagine him trying to hide in regular society to basically be unnoticed?

[00:47:48] Tim: That was, is like. Yeah, that he would be noticed anywhere he went 

[00:47:53] Donna: Similar to that, I, I did watch at least one reviewer talk about how, [00:48:00] um, the camera shots in the Lago film, there were some absolutely breathtaking, beautiful camera shots where the camera would move or do something, but they didn’t take advantage of that.

[00:48:14] Donna: He, he said, obviously the talent was there because they had some of them in the film and they showed a couple of examples where they would either traveling across the country or looking back, laid pan back to see maybe some of the castle or whatever. But they said so much of it, they just used a still camera.

[00:48:38] Donna: Then very little movement of the characters too. So, I mean, I wonder if, uh, just because we’re in the beginning of moving film and then early on in talking pictures too, that the acting was so bizarre, whatever 

[00:48:54] Josiah: really crazy stuff, I mean, to finish off on No Rasu, it was released March 4th, [00:49:00] 1922. Very hard to track budget or box office numbers from back then, especially inter Beum.

[00:49:07] Josiah: Germany didn’t have good records, but it seems like it was made. Some people are educatedly, guess about 24,000 bucks and some, and a lot of people say it, it made between 30 and 50,000 bucks at the box office is, it was low budget. It didn’t make a lot of money, but it seems to have made its budget back.

[00:49:30] Josiah: But as dad mentioned, it was legally all of the copies were ordered to be destroyed. So. You know, the fact that we can watch it today, it’s legally should not be possible. But it influenced a lot of, uh, vampire lore in the nowadays and it shouldn’t have. 

[00:49:50] Rebekah: So I watched for the first time actually, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

[00:49:55] Rebekah: Uh, this was the 19 92 1 with, uh, Francis Ford Coppola as the director, [00:50:00] um, who directed The Godfather. I am learning names. We’ve covered the Godfather. Shout out to go listen to one of our audio only episodes from season two. I think we’re in season three right now, so I don’t know. I get lost. Um, so I had never seen this.

[00:50:18] Rebekah: Josh had seen it before though. Uh, so I’ll talk about, I this is the one. Keanu Reeves is Jonathan Harker, one of the main characters, uh, like throughout. He’s, I think, a bigger feature than in like some of the versions we’ve been talking about. I would say this is also. One of the two that’s like the most accurate to the book, um, from what we saw.

[00:50:39] Rebekah: So Anthony Hopkins is, uh, van Helsing. Gary Oldman plays Dracula. So I recognized a lot of the cast. So they follow the plot, honestly, like pretty faithfully. There’s a few changes I’ll talk about, but um, they really do kind of like follow the exact book plot, including even the way that [00:51:00] they like band together and different things like that.

[00:51:02] Rebekah: So anyway, they follow a lot of it. The biggest things I noticed, number one, the film opens with a backstory on Dracula. So instead of just a straight horror film, basically they add this backstory to make it a tragic love story. In 1462, Dracula, a human, not a vampire, but he was like a warrior fighting on behalf of the church in a war.

[00:51:23] Rebekah: His wife Eita dies while he’s away and he’s deeply in love with Eita, played by Winona Rider, uh, Eli Eita dies and then his anger at her death and like the fact that the church allowed this to happen, he becomes transformed into an evil undead monster. There’s like blood that comes out of a cross and like all this stuff, it’s very religiously motive, like very charged religiously.

[00:51:50] Rebekah: He transforms into the Dracula, the vampire character, but what it does is basically gives him motivation instead of just being a guy [00:52:00] that’s like ban a vampire. When he gets to know Jonathan Harker later on, he sees a picture of Jonathan’s fiance, Mina Mina, also played by Winona Rider, and he goes, oh, it looks like her.

[00:52:13] Rebekah: And so it seems like the whole thing is kind of like him trying to relive his romance with his dead wife. 

[00:52:19] Donna: They don’t ever say it’s reincarnation, 

[00:52:22] Rebekah: right? No, it doesn’t seem like she’s the same person from everything I saw, at least it just looks as if he’s like, oh, this looks like this person. So it basically was, I think the first, and I, you can correct me if I’m wrong, I don’t know.

[00:52:37] Rebekah: ’cause dad did watch one that’s a little older, but um, I think this was the first time that that full backstory thing was like added. It is not in the book. And I think that that backstory though, is used in multiple iterations moving forward. Like it’s mentioned, like in Renfield, he talks about some of that stuff.

[00:52:55] Rebekah: So I thought that was interesting. And 

[00:52:57] Donna: in the 26th version, it’s gonna [00:53:00] be, that’s. The pinnacle of 

[00:53:02] Rebekah: the whole story. Okay. So it’s the tragic 

[00:53:03] Donna: is him and Elza. Beatta. Got 

[00:53:05] Rebekah: it. So second biggest change, and this is the part that bugged me the most. ’cause it was frustrating. It’s like super sexual. It is grossly super sexual.

[00:53:17] Rebekah: So I don’t like this for many reasons. Number one, I don’t like to watch smut in general. Like I avoid sexual content in movies most of the time anyway. Um, however, I think the thing that bothered me most, it made two things change. Well, three really. One Lucy is made out to be SK Capus. Okay. 

[00:53:36] Josiah: Yeah. That was disgusted.

[00:53:38] Josiah: She, I was disgusted by that. 

[00:53:39] Rebekah: She in the book is, it was so p talk about her all the time as this like innocent, sweet, like cherished person. She’s proposed to by three men on the same day and it is a difficult choice for her, but it’s like she’s very innocent. The film made it look like, how many times can I blink these various men before choosing who to engage.

[00:53:59] Rebekah: It was [00:54:00] very frustrating. 

[00:54:01] Donna: Why? Why did they have her and me a kiss? Why did they do that? It’s so weird. I was like, the rest of it’s bad enough and then you add this random girl, girl kiss in. Oh yeah, I, and I’m sorry, I didn’t know you hadn’t watched it before. I would have given you No, 

[00:54:21] Rebekah: I’m glad 

[00:54:21] Donna: I a warning about, I’m sorry.

[00:54:22] Donna: I’m glad I watched it. It was, 

[00:54:23] Rebekah: Josh had already seen it, so he literally was like, I have to go to Sam’s Club. You can watch it while I’m gone. I was like, okay. So, um, I didn’t love that because in the book, Lucy becomes maybe a little more sensual, like the vampirism, like there’s kind of some very slight, very slight undertones of like.

[00:54:44] Rebekah: Right. It’s very minor in the movie. It was like, she was like that before any vampirism stuff. So it was like, it just made it, her personality 

[00:54:52] Josiah: defeats the purpose of Lucy. I think in the novel, there’s like a word or something that Bram adds [00:55:00] in. There’s not really a lot of action that’s sexual. Mm-hmm. But I think with Lucy and with the three vampire women in Transylvania, he throws in the word something like voluptuous or lusty.

[00:55:12] Rebekah: He says voluptuous lips. At one point I did remember that. 

[00:55:15] Donna: And the most, the most connection that he, excuse me, that he describes in the book is like, Jonathan felt her teeth against his neck. You don’t even, he d he stops there. So all of his descriptions are very. Clean descriptions because he was focusing, I think, on the horror aspect and not trying to get there.

[00:55:42] Donna: So, 

[00:55:42] Rebekah: and so that brings me the second thing, uh, about the sexual undertones. It was tough. So Jonathan Harker in the book notes, he feels guilty when the three ladies like put their teeth to his neck. Like you said in the movie. He like cheats on, well, she’s his fiance, so they’re [00:56:00] not married, but he does cheat on her.

[00:56:01] Rebekah: Like while in the, the chapel area of Draculas Castle, that bugs me a lot. The third one, which I think is probably the worst, is that Mina’s role is then sexualized. So in the book. In 1897, she is given a lot of agency. She’s very intelligent. She’s the one that pulls together a lot of the information that tells the group of people what to do.

[00:56:25] Rebekah: Now the men still wanna protect her and things like that, but she’s given a lot of agency and is obviously one of the people that mainly leads to the downfall of Dracula. However, in the movie rather, again, she is also very sexualized and like it becomes more about that. Also in this film, Dracula is shown walking in sunlight without being weakened.

[00:56:50] Rebekah: Now being destroyed by sun. Sunlight, as Josiah pointed out, is introduced in the Nosferatu film from 1922. This film kept some of [00:57:00] the book like where he can walk in sunlight, but unlike the book does not emphasize that he is like supposed to be weakened when out in it. So it kind of like, it just like cut that all together the way that they do the plot, including the murdering of and drinking blood of babies, which is so creepy by the way.

[00:57:22] Rebekah: Uh, gets kept from the, the book. The film actually did keep some of the, like, epistolary. It’s not all like that obviously you just see on scene. Yeah. But screen. But they do hear not only different POVs, but also like them reading letters from like Jonathan reading a letter he wrote to Mina and, and so on and so forth.

[00:57:41] Rebekah: I think the other, um, the other thing they added and tell me if this is if correct, but Mina makes a lot of comments in the movie about how Rich Lucy is and like she tries to draw a lot of comparisons to like how poor she is versus Lucy’s rich. [00:58:00] Um. Aristo aristocratic lifestyle. I think it was kind of like part of them making Lucy into that troopy kind of character was like, she’s just rich and has nothing to do with her time.

[00:58:11] Rebekah: Whereas Mina was like a teacher and so she had to like, she was like more well studied and stuff. So 

[00:58:17] Donna: yeah. And the Karma su bringing in the Karma Sutra, I was like, couple of, what are you doing? Why 

[00:58:24] Rebekah: mom? You’ve seen The Godfather at least twice. So 

[00:58:29] Josiah: in the book, Mina is a teacher, so she is a working woman, whereas Lucy does not have a job.

[00:58:35] Josiah: So like that basis is there where Lucy doesn’t have to work to live. Uh, me and Mina does work, but yeah, I don’t think it goes much beyond that in the book. 

[00:58:47] Rebekah: Well, uh, this was out on November 13th of 92. Um, rotten Tomatoes gives it a 69%. I mean, it is more positive than negative ratings. And then the box office for this one, pretty high [00:59:00] at 216 million.

[00:59:01] Rebekah: So it’s, I would say this is like probably one of the more well-known, like, well, more Rewatched Dracula films. You know, 

[00:59:09] Josiah: it, it may be the last Francis Ford Coppola movie. To have a positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes and to make money at the box office. 

[00:59:19] Tim: It was also one of, one of the last movies of this type that used practical effects for a lot of things.

[00:59:29] Tim: The, the Strange Shadow stuff in the background is not cg, it’s another, it’s another actor in Shadow. 

[00:59:36] Donna: And it was also another reminder to me that, you know, I love Keanu Reeves, but um, especially that probably heightened the affection I found for Dracula when he was in London on the street, because I looked at him and I thought, okay, she could be with Keanu Reeves, Jonathan, or Vlad.

[00:59:59] Donna: [01:00:00] The handsome dapper gentleman Dracula. What was that? 

[01:00:04] Tim: It’s still a little 

[01:00:04] Donna: weird looking. Yeah. But hey, kudos to him still. He’s, 

[01:00:08] Tim: I one of the reviewers that, that we listened to mm-hmm. Said this is probably Gary, one of Gary Oldman’s very best pieces of work. Oh, he is in completely amazing, in a plethora of great works.

[01:00:20] Tim: ’cause he’s a real Oldman fan. Mm-hmm. He said, unfortunately it is also Keanu Reeve’s probably one of his worst roles. Uh, because the accent is un is strange. Yeah. He, yeah. 

[01:00:34] Rebekah: He acts so poorly. It like, it literally is like the one time I’ve seen him look. Unintentionally just like awkward as an actor, not like an awkward character.

[01:00:45] Rebekah: Like he seemed like even delivering his lines. It was like, seemed like a person who had just learned his lines, you know what I mean? It was weird. 

[01:00:53] Tim: So now we get to, uh, the 1977 B. BC. TV, film [01:01:00] Dracula, which is considered by Cinema Massacre and most other sources to be the most book accurate. Um, you’ve probably never seen it.

[01:01:12] Tim: This was the first time I’d ever seen it and I like it. I mean, I, I, I like it and I like Dracula and stuff like that, but I had never seen this one before. 

[01:01:20] Josiah: Cinema Massacre is a YouTube channel. It’s the same guy who does angry video game nerd, but angry video game nerd is like a persona. Cinema massacre is more like his natural personality.

[01:01:29] Josiah: He did this awesome video and we didn’t wanna mention it at first, so you listened to our episodes instead of his video. He does great video. It’s like 35 minutes on 12 different, the 12 closest Dracula adaptations and how close to the book they follow. Not the best one, but the best adaptation. And so that was a great inspiration for this podcast episode.

[01:01:53] Josiah: So that’s why we mentioned it. Uh, cinema Massacre. Considers this one to be the most book accurate. 

[01:01:58] Tim: Definitely [01:02:00] this one has, it hits lots and lots of the elements. Um, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Dracula is very alien and predatory. Um, in this one he’s a little bit more romantic, a little bit more tragic, but he’s still very close to that.

[01:02:17] Tim: The tone is very similar with the romance. It’s kind of subtle. Um, the violence in horror is similar. The movie does make a change with the ending. Uh, in the book. Dracula’s destroyed quickly, almost anti climatically during the chase back to Transylvania. In the BBC film, we get a much more dramatic emotionally charged death, which is kind of neat.

[01:02:44] Tim: Uh, nice change. The BBC movie, uh, is really a tragic gothic romance. Based on what people in the 1970s would’ve considered gothic romance. [01:03:00] The atmosphere is the same. You know, it’s the foggy London kind of thing. And, uh, Dracula’s, an aristocrat in, in this one. Mina is a central figure. She does have agency and Van Helsing is the intellectual hero.

[01:03:15] Tim: Some of the ones that I, that I watched other than this, um, aside from Meina not having much agency or brains in some of them, um, there are a couple of them that Van Helsing is the primary character and most everybody else is not, is missing. Uh, but this one kept him there 

[01:03:35] Josiah: about Van Helsing. I did think it was interesting in the novel that he does become the exposition machine because he, he’s the source of a lot of knowledge.

[01:03:48] Josiah: On this sort of thing. And he occasionally might have diary entries and stuff, but he is kind of in, he’s incorporated as one of the friends, as one of the [01:04:00] new, he’s the new addition to the friends. Uh, and I think it’s natural. I mean, I’ll bring in my play. Van Helsing doesn’t come in until act two, and yet he does have more lines than anyone else in my play.

[01:04:17] Tim: That is interesting because most of the films, Dracula has some of the smallest lines overall, so. As far as characters are concerned, Dracula’s more romantic and tragic in the BBC version than he is in the novel. Um, his relationship with Mina is more in the foreground. Um, a little bit more like some of the other more recent films in the novel.

[01:04:47] Tim: Lucy’s demise is very much, uh, horror and moral corruption. Um, but it’s less graphic in the film. I mean, you can understand that they, [01:05:00] they were doing it for tv, so the audience would’ve been more, uh, more general audience, which is what g is supposed to mean, or at least originally should have meant. Kind of lean on the psychological as opposed to the physically horror stuff.

[01:05:19] Tim: Um, I did look at a couple of, uh, couple of different things. I had a couple different thoughts. The film, the 77 film, reshapes the material from Fear Invasion and Moral Panic from Stoker and makes it more somber, gothic tragedy. It also, I think, moves a little slower. Um, it is a hundred, it’s 150 minutes, I think, something like that.

[01:05:45] Tim: Uh, somewhere around that. And it was originally released before Christmas and then later was released Rereleased as a, as three part mini series. 50 minute episodes. The BBC film [01:06:00] comes the closest, although you still miss. The way the book builds the horror, the diary entries, the different writings and things like that just kind of keep layering on top of each other, uh, in the, in the book.

[01:06:16] Tim: And none of the films are able to really do that. Um, probably Coppola does the better job of that. 

[01:06:23] Rebekah: It, it was a very, very slow pickup in the book for me. And that, you know, I think that that is harder to do in film, but I would agree with your assessment. 

[01:06:33] Tim: Yeah. So it was, you could have, you could have bought the BBC version, um, when it came out on DVD, you know, in 2000 I think it was.

[01:06:45] Josiah: I, I like the book’s buildup. One of my biggest problems with the pacing of the book is after Mina collects the information to know everything about Dracula. Before they get [01:07:00] to Transylvania, I think is too long. They basically solve the problem and then there are so many chapters before they like physically solve the problem.

[01:07:11] Josiah: They, they solve the mystery and then multiple, multiple chapters before they solve the problem physically. 

[01:07:17] Tim: Multiple chapters. I was listening to it at 1.2 and there was still over four hours left Once they decided this is what we have to do and we’re headed there, and I said to your mom who had already finished reading or listening to it, I said, there’s still four hours.

[01:07:34] Tim: Is there some kind of after thing? Nope. It just takes that much longer to get there. 

[01:07:41] Josiah: How much of the movie was Harker at the castle? Was it, how much of the, you know, 150 minutes, would you say? It was a half hour. 

[01:07:54] Tim: Maybe. Yeah. Uh, if I remember correctly, it established him [01:08:00] in his relationship. It didn’t start with him at the castle.

[01:08:03] Tim: It established his relationship. Then he went and then spent some time and then came back. So you were, you were already introduced to, to, uh, Mina and Lucy at the beginning. 

[01:08:15] Donna: You see, well, Renfield in the Laci film, but you see him or Harker in the carriage going across the countryside in a few different things.

[01:08:26] Donna: Uh, we watched or, or read about, you see that part of the beginning where they meet the towns folk who are terrified, or the people in the carriage who, when they realize where he is going, it’s like, oh, you know, and so there’s. A lot of them use that, you know, to establish the fear part. But one thing I’m finding, as we have talked about the different things we’ve watched, it seems like filmmakers in general are wanting to bring in either a more [01:09:00] romantic, whether it’s s muddy or uh, or more love story connection into their retelling.

[01:09:10] Donna: But I found the book very or more gory. Um, yeah. Or, or more gory. 

[01:09:17] Josiah: You know what, I found the book to be very Christian. It was very much 

[01:09:23] Donna: Yes. 

[01:09:24] Tim: Oh 

[01:09:24] Donna: no. And nobody wants 

[01:09:25] Josiah: to do that. No one wants to do five Christians set out to destroy a demon. 

[01:09:30] Tim: Uh, one of the, one of the Hammer movies actually. The main character.

[01:09:36] Tim: And it was funny because three movies in a row, the main, the main character besides Dracula was a man named Paul. It was never the same actor, but it was, it was a man named Paul. The reviewer said, why didn’t they change his name? But anyway, the first one, uh, he’s talking to, he’s actually going to marry, uh, the woman in her.

[01:09:58] Tim: He’s sitting with her [01:10:00] father talking about, you know, asking for her hand in marriage. And he asks him about his life and he says, well, I’m an atheist. And so it, it’s the first one of the movies that really kind of turns, that turns that it’s very Christian on its head by saying, okay, the main protagonist is going to be an atheist.

[01:10:21] Tim: But by the end of the film, he realizes that the only thing that can defeat. Dracula are these religious things. And so he believes in their effectiveness because when he first uses them, he doesn’t believe and they don’t work. He pulls the stake out, throws it back at him. You know, all those kinds of things.

[01:10:41] Donna: I think a lot of the iterations do make Van Helsing speak religiously, but it’s like they wanna shy away from the tone of the book where it was these five Christian people on this quest to go [01:11:00] against this evil 

[01:11:01] Tim: on the on Rotten Tomatoes. It did, um, the 77 version got an 80%, and I understand, uh, that was, uh, IMDB said 7.2 out of 10 with, uh, more than 2000.

[01:11:14] Tim: Users. So it was, it was well received, it was pretty well, uh, critically acclaimed for being a faithful adaptation. 

[01:11:24] Donna: Um, and Dracula was portrayed by Louis Jordan, who is a French actor. And he’s a very handsome, he’s a very handsome man. Uh, I can, he reminds me of, of the, he has a look that my mother would’ve said was just very handsome and very, uh, very clean looking.

[01:11:44] Donna: And so he had played several, uh, leading men or romantic roles in his, in his acting history. And so he was a, I thought he was a pretty good, he was a good romantic representation of Dracula for [01:12:00] sure. 

[01:12:00] Rebekah: Um, the last Dracula related film I wanted to cover when we were kind of doing these, and this one will be quick ’cause it’s not a perfect, it’s not like a direct adaptation, but.

[01:12:09] Rebekah: I loved Renfield from 2023. It, I’ve watched it several times. I think it is a blast. So I just wanted to kind of touch on it. If you haven’t seen it and you are into like that horror comedy kind of idea, I think you would like it. Um, it starts Nicholas Cage. Nicholas Holt, and, um, the, don’t Be Suspicious, that guy, what’s, I can’t remember, sch his name.

[01:12:34] Rebekah: Ben Schwartz from, yeah. Ben Schwartz. The three of them are kind of three of the most, uh, main characters and Aquafina, so it’s a horror comedy. Renfield is in a support group for people in codependent relationships and uh, it’s hilarious. Like he talks about how like, it’s so funny like all of the connections they make.

[01:12:56] Rebekah: So it keeps the film backstory that I don’t, I didn’t [01:13:00] mention, but this is from the 92 Brahm Stoker’s Dracula film. This is not in the book. That Renfield was not just a patient of Seward’s, he was actually sent as a, what do they call it? Not an attorney, but they solicitor call it solicitor. Solicitor. Yes.

[01:13:17] Rebekah: Solicitor. The one solicitor sent first before Jonathan Harker to Sylvania to meet Dracula and send him. Oh 

[01:13:23] Josiah: yeah. And I think that was a little bit born out of the LA film, sending Renfield and not Harker. And then Bram Stoker’s Dracula kind of split it into two. They 

[01:13:34] Rebekah: kinda like tweaked. 

[01:13:35] Josiah: Yeah. 

[01:13:35] Rebekah: Okay. Um, so in Renfield, the movie, he originally says he met Dracula, um, by like going as a solicitor to Transylvania.

[01:13:48] Rebekah: Uh, he was not a patient in a mental institution. He does actually have some of Dracula’s powers, not as much, but he’s very powerful. But instead of eating humans, he [01:14:00] eats bugs to do them. So he explains the, like renfield trope, not trope, but like backstory of like bug eating that those give him powers, which I think is hilarious.

[01:14:10] Rebekah: It’s very gross. And I, it’s a horror comedy. It’s, you know, it’s very in the realm, in the vein of like, um, what’s the, what are the two British guys? They did a couple Hot fuzz and then Yeah. Nicholas. They did one that was a, a, a 

[01:14:25] Tim: Nick 

[01:14:26] Rebekah: Frost, not Vampire Simon. 

[01:14:27] Tim: Oh, one of them was Scotty on the new 

[01:14:29] Rebekah: Enterprise.

[01:14:29] Rebekah: Yes, Simon. They, they also did like a zombie one. This reminds me of those vibes a lot. Yeah. Shauna the dead. That’s it. Um, Dracula also gets like damaged very severely, like to the point where you see his skin sloughed off and you see his like bones and stuff. Like, basically it’s Ren Field’s job to like find them a place to lay low so that his vampire can convalesce, which is hilarious.

[01:14:55] Rebekah: Um, it is a fun film. Uh, I think the [01:15:00] one thing that came out like as I was like watching it and thinking back to the book that I did think was really interesting was Rebecca Quincy, who’s played by Aquafina, is a police officer. She is kind of the Meina character, um, in a, in some ways, like she’s very powerful, has a lot of agency.

[01:15:18] Rebekah: She’s the one putting all the puzzle pieces together. Um, and ultimately she and Renfield take Dracula down. But Ren Field’s desire for her, although it is romantic in this movie, whereas in the book he’s not like romantically interested in Mina. Um, Ren Field’s desire for Rebecca Quincy is what causes him to ultimately like fight back against Dracula.

[01:15:39] Rebekah: For real, for real. So. I thought it was so fun. Like it is an amazing film. It does have a 59% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is stupid. Do not come at me. This film is so much fun. 

[01:15:50] Josiah: I mean, Nick Holt is cute and was it Aquafina playing? Rebecca Quincy. 

[01:15:55] Rebekah: Yeah. 

[01:15:56] Josiah: And she, she, I like Aquafina. She’s very funny. But [01:16:00] Nick Cage really makes the movie for me.

[01:16:01] Josiah: Nick Cage is 

[01:16:02] Rebekah: Dracula. Oh my gosh. He is just, oh, he’s hilarious. 

[01:16:05] Josiah: Wish fulfillment. 

[01:16:06] Rebekah: This is a year before the menu, which is the, uh, the chef related story that Nicholas Holt was in. 

[01:16:13] Donna: Yeah. Where they’re out on an island and he plays a very creepy, weird character. And so I think he, I think he, the, that’s the reason I brought it up.

[01:16:23] Donna: He excels at that. I think he come, he can come across really either awkward or, um, just strange. He, he pulls that off. You can believe that. I guess. 

[01:16:34] Tim: Do you realize that John Williams, the famous composer. Composed for a Dracula film. 

[01:16:41] Rebekah: Oh, I did not know that. Was it the Coppola one? 

[01:16:44] Donna: One 

[01:16:44] Tim: of 

[01:16:44] Donna: ours, 

[01:16:45] Tim: not one of the ones we covered.

[01:16:47] Tim: It was the 19 se, it was the 1979 Dracula that has, uh, Franklin J in it. 

[01:16:53] Rebekah: Oh, fun. 

[01:16:54] Tim: Oh cool. He composed in 1979. Drac Love. 

[01:16:58] Rebekah: That’s pretty cool. [01:17:00] Renfield only made 26 million at the box office. My guess is that it did not hit its budget, but it was still, I will say kind of after COVID, it was still released really quickly on film or from film to streaming.

[01:17:12] Rebekah: So it was released on April 14th on in theaters. The digital and Blu-ray release was June 6th, so they didn’t give it very long, but, 

[01:17:22] Josiah: well, Rebecca, do you know what, so the two Dracula films you watched, what is the familial connection? What’s the family connection between two major players in those two films?

[01:17:36] Josiah: There’s a nephew, uncle relationship. 

[01:17:39] Tim: Actual actual family connection. 

[01:17:42] Rebekah: Okay. 

[01:17:42] Josiah: Hmm. 

[01:17:43] Rebekah: Is one of them. Oh, wow. Gary Oldman? 

[01:17:46] Josiah: No. 

[01:17:48] Rebekah: Is one of them. Nicholas Cage? Yes. Okay. So Nicholas Cage is the older one or the younger one in this familial relationship. He’s the nephew. [01:18:00] Uh, is it, is it, um, is it, um, the guy that played Van Helsing?

[01:18:07] Josiah: Oh no, not Anthony Hopkins. He is Oh, he is the nephew of the director Francis Ford Coppola. Nick Nick Cage. Oh, I did not know 

[01:18:15] Rebekah: that. That’s why 

[01:18:16] Josiah: Nicholas Cage’s real last name is Coppola. 

[01:18:20] Donna: Oh, that’s amazing. 

[01:18:21] Rebekah: Did 

[01:18:21] Donna: not 

[01:18:22] Josiah: know that. 

[01:18:23] Donna: And the, in the Lago film, there’s a teenage girl who’s 14 years old at the time of filming, who was the niece of the president of Universal.

[01:18:36] Donna: And she got a bit part in the film and she has this real, she’s a little teenage drama queen that’s like, oh no, what are we doing? He can’t go there. And he’s, she has this little part, and she was also the oldest, the, she survived the longest of all the people in the cast of that film. And she passed away, I think in the early two thousands, I think.

[01:18:59] Donna: [01:19:00] Anyway, familial relationship for whatever that is. And from which film 

[01:19:02] Tim: was 

[01:19:03] Donna: that? The leg films. Amazing. Mm-hmm. 

[01:19:05] Tim: Wow. 

[01:19:06] Donna: Anyway, yeah, it’s cool. 

[01:19:09] Rebekah: So for our little mini game section, we had two fun things we wanted to cover. First of all, we had a Patreon sub who is in our discord. Seth, uh, Seth asks, and this is a question each of us can answer, if you could turn into a vampire from, which movie or book would you be?

[01:19:26] Rebekah: I mean, I’m gonna say Redfield ’cause it’s the funniest version in my opinion. Um, and I definitely hate all of the other ones in terms of the way that they’re vampires. So that’s my answer. 

[01:19:37] Josiah: Okay. I’m gonna say twilight. 

[01:19:39] Rebekah: Okay. 

[01:19:40] Josiah: Just says, it 

[01:19:40] Rebekah: doesn’t say, I thought we were picking from this episode, episode of the Soul.

[01:19:43] Rebekah: Yeah. I thought we were choosing from this episode books. Oh gosh. I would wanna be a twilight vampire. If I had to choose, 

[01:19:50] Donna: I would be a lost boys vampire. Of course. 

[01:19:54] Tim: Probably the interview with a vampire. 

[01:19:56] Rebekah: What is that kind of vampire again? 

[01:19:58] Tim: Well, it’s Tom [01:20:00] Cruise and Brad Pitt. 

[01:20:01] Rebekah: Oh, you just wanna look like 

[01:20:02] Tim: Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.

[01:20:04] Tim: Okay, got it, got it. 

[01:20:05] Donna: They’re very, it’s, it’s, it is, I mean, there’s sexual content there too, but I mean, honey’s Broom, broom. Look at, oh my 

[01:20:11] Tim: gosh. There’s a, um, there’s another vampire 

[01:20:15] Josiah: only listeners Vampire Mini Series. Series. Just pulled down her, the shirt at the shoulder to invite our father. I just exposed my neck a little bit, father, the pastor, to bite her on the neck.

[01:20:33] Donna: Confus 

[01:20:34] Rebekah: so. Hmm. For our second little mini game section here, Josiah, you wrote a stage play based on this book. What did you change? Like what, what direction did you take it? 

[01:20:46] Josiah: Okay. Big changes. So act one is actually shorter than act two. Act one is Jonathan Harker at Dracula Castle and the demeanor. Um, so I, I, I try to take [01:21:00] my time ’cause I think Dracula’s Castle, uh, with Jonathan Harker is the most suspenseful part.

[01:21:06] Josiah: I think it’s just, and, and the demeanor are both so suspenseful, whereas once you get to all the friends, it’s really cool, but it’s not suspenseful horror as much as it is an adventure, like a gothic adventure novel instead. So I, I wanted to focus on the suspense of it in the first act. Um, I do have a scene before Harker goes to the castle.

[01:21:30] Josiah: Where you introdu, where you’re introduced to all the characters. That’s where Lucy gets enga, uh, proposed to by three men in the same day. Uh, I’m, I make a big deal out of that as well. Thematically, I think Bram Stoker has this a little bit, but I have a, it’s Seward, Homewood and Quincy all propose to her.

[01:21:54] Josiah: They, they ask for her heart. They all, those are the three who [01:22:00] give her the blood transfusion to try to save her life at the beginning of Act two, that Van Helsing recommends. And those, and those three men all stab her, uh, as a vampire. So I, I keep that through line of, they, those are the three men who ask for her heart, who pump blood into her heart, and who stab her in the heart di big differences.

[01:22:26] Josiah: I currently open the play with the brides of Frank, of Frankenstein, of Dracula, singing a little song to be creepy, to kind of establish that setting before you go to the Happy Friends in England. Act two opens with Renfield and Dracula does this thing. It’s, it’s a shortened version, but it’s, it’s kind of from the book.

[01:22:47] Josiah: Uh, the biggest difference I would say is that I make Dr. Seward into a villain at the beginning. So basically he is [01:23:00] offended that Lucy did not accept his proposal, and in the same breath, he sees Mina, who is in love with Harker, who’s there, but they’re not engaged. And so Seward. You later learn is kind of thinking, oh, well maybe I’ll get the second best.

[01:23:23] Josiah: I’ll get Mina. I can. I just wanna marry. I wanna marry someone. And I’m jilted. So Renfield, I take from Laci and from Coppola’s version Renfield is Dracula’s solicitor, but he has gone insane. So Dr. Seward is one of the people in charge of giving Ren Fields’s clients away, like finding solicitors. And he tells Harker who he knows is down on his luck.

[01:23:54] Josiah: Hey Harker, I have this guy in Transylvania. You should go sell him a house. I know that you’re [01:24:00] struggling. This will really give you enough money to. You know, feel comfortable enough to marry someone. ’cause he doesn’t wanna marry before he has money. So Seward basically sends him to Dracula, not thinking he’s a vampire, but thinking, okay, that’ll be long enough for me to convince Mina to marry me because she’s poor and he does that.

[01:24:20] Josiah: So, uh, I also have Harker not escape, castle Dracula. It’s a cliffhanger. You think he might be dead at the end of Act one. But then they get to Castle Dracula at the end of Act two and they find that the brides of Dracula, the sister brides, have been keeping him alive so that they can slowly pump a little bit of blood out of him at a time and have a constant source of blood instead of killing or turning harker and then running out of his blood.

[01:24:53] Josiah: So, uh, they kept him alive, torturing him, but he’s alive and he’s reunited with Mina. But Mina is married to [01:25:00] Seward. Uh, when they are reunited. So it’s a little, it’s hard for them. And in the last scene, before the final confrontation with Dracula, which I do, I do put at Castle Dracula, Dracula’s awake. I don’t have him sleeping.

[01:25:14] Josiah: Uh, Seward has had this change of heart. He starts feeling bad about everything, and he’s like, Mina, just, I’m going to divorce you. You’re not in love with me. You need to marry Harper. And she, you know, she’s turning into a vampire at this point, but he’s like, I, I believe everything will turn out well. And when all this is done, I don’t think that you and I should stay together.

[01:25:40] Josiah: You should be with Harker. It’s clearly meant to be. And she says, I made a vow to you before God. I’m not divorcing you. And so it is Seward who sacrifices himself to kill Dracula, and he’s the one who kills Dracula, and it also kills him. Freeing Mina up to [01:26:00] Mary Jonathan for a little cool time jump.

[01:26:02] Donna: Literally cannot wait. 

[01:26:04] Rebekah: Yeah, I was gonna say this hasn’t been on stage yet. 

[01:26:06] Josiah: Not yet. We’ve had a few, uh, readings of it and they, they’ve gone really well. It’s, it’s still 15 minutes too long and I’m getting to the point where it’s only cool stuff left, so it’s really hard to cut any more stuff ’cause it’s also fun.

[01:26:22] Rebekah: Do you have any plans for when that’ll come out? 

[01:26:24] Josiah: It’s a good question. I’ve just had so many things on the docket. I need to, maybe it’s a New Year’s resolution for me to find a place for this. I’ve, I’ve mentioned it to a couple people. Murphysboro Donaldson. Now I’m working at a professional theater that just did a Dracula adaptation, the script of which I was very critical.

[01:26:47] Josiah: Uh, you know, probably shouldn’t put too much on the record, but, uh, I think it’s gonna be beautiful. It’s gonna be a lot of fun. I think that. It adds. I don’t think it takes away much at [01:27:00] all from the novel. And I do think story-wise it adds a little bit. 

[01:27:05] Tim: I have a question. Which character was absent from the version you watched or present in the version you watched that you wish would’ve been the opposite?

[01:27:20] Tim: Would’ve been included if they were excluded or would’ve been excluded if they were included? 

[01:27:25] Donna: That’s an easy one for me. The Lago film made ess character a very shallow, I was so disappointed in the shallowness of that character. And after I watched it, uh, I was almost finished with the book and the ending of the book even Ramps up Mina’s.

[01:27:51] Donna: The strength of her character even more. And so I was so distress distressed watching it, thinking, why did you do that with her? [01:28:00] She, she’s this incredible, deep, wonderful person in this story. So that was easy one for me. This is Mina 

[01:28:10] Josiah: in the Nose, FRA two silent film. I don’t think adding, you know, a Seward or a Quincy or a Homewood would’ve added much to that story they were telling.

[01:28:21] Josiah: So what we were left with Harker is just such a, Ooh, I’m, I’m the Harker Standin, I forget what his name is, but it’s, it’s Hutter, H-U-T-T-E-R. I’m hotter. Oh, I love the meaner standin. Oh, what’s this rat person doing? Buying a house across from the street from me. Ooh. I’m just a little dandy that that didn’t really do much for me.

[01:28:46] Josiah: I wish that I, I was very disappointed in the adaptation of the Harker character. 

[01:28:51] Rebekah: I did not like Lucy in my adaptation in the Coppola version. I was just, 

[01:28:57] Tim: oh yeah, 

[01:28:57] Rebekah: that’s, I said it, and it was just like, [01:29:00] it was the most distracting ones. Not a big fan of that. So 

[01:29:03] Tim: I think that’s, I think that’s wonderful. I watched several different ones, um, and one of the ones that I watched just extra, not, not one of the ones we really reviewed, um, left Out Quincy.

[01:29:19] Tim: I thought that was, um, that was a miss. He’s an awkward character. The novel. It, it is awkward. Everyone’s British or European, he’s from America, you know? Um, how do they know each other? Well, the novel gives them a good backstory, although it’s only hinted at, um, not, not really explored in depth, but I like the Quincy character.

[01:29:44] Tim: And so in the ones that I watched without him, it’s like, oh, everybody’s so serious. 

[01:29:51] Josiah: Mm-hmm. 

[01:29:51] Tim: You need Quincy, who’s a little lighter. 

[01:29:53] Josiah: I, it’s one of those things where everyone at the read through was like, why was this [01:30:00] character here? I was like, it’s in the original novel. Like, that’s crazy that, that’s in the original novel.

[01:30:06] Josiah: But, uh, it adds a lot of, of comic relief, literally relief. From the serious drama. I love Quincy being there. Well, kind of like with Godfather, there were just a few chapters that I have to completely ignore. ’cause I think the book is kind of a masterpiece. Um, I think it’s slow in the end, and I just kind of have to breeze past the chapters in between them, basically solving the mystery and actually physically solving the problem so long between those two things.

[01:30:40] Josiah: Uh, but other than that, I think it, it was a lot better than I thought it would be. When I read it last year, I was like, oh, this is unique. And with the found footage element, it’s, it had probably been done before, but so extensive in sticking to that, [01:31:00] uh, format. I thought it was very effective in, uh, ’cause almost every book from that day would’ve been told from an omniscient narrator perspective where Bram Stoker would’ve said, and Dracula did this because this is his power and this is what he was thinking and would’ve taken all the mystery out of it.

[01:31:19] Josiah: But in making it from these people’s perspectives sucks you into their world in Victorian England where they don’t know what’s happening. They don’t have the lore of vampires, uh, they don’t see inside, uh, the head of Dracula. And it, even the format of the novel actually contributing to the final plot of Mina, putting it all together so that they can defeat Dracula with information, the information they have.

[01:31:49] Josiah: I think it’s just kind of a stoke of genius, a stoker of genius. Mm-hmm. Or so [01:32:00] altogether. I mean, I’d give the book, like if I can breeze past the last four hours of the book and then just skip the last two, two or three chapters, then I would say nine, nine and a half outta 10. I think that, you know, nose Farrah two silent film is classic, but you know, it’s a silent film.

[01:32:20] Josiah: It’s just so old Lai film. LAI’s great, but it’s just so old and not greatly, you know, the other actors weren’t in it. You can tell. Uh, I didn’t see the 77 TV film. That would be interesting to watch for sure. Especially if it’s free on YouTube, you said. But, um, you know, the, the cop cop Dracula, I don’t ever wanna watch it again.

[01:32:45] Josiah: Uh, and it was way too sexual, but that’s probably like the most artistic of the movies, the most beautifully gothic. I wish that it, that that world weren’t filled with such [01:33:00] disgusting unlikable characters that get up to disgusting things. But I think that it is probably the most artistic and beautiful movie adaptation.

[01:33:13] Josiah: I, 

[01:33:13] Donna: uh, loved reading this book. I didn’t know what I’d think about it. I wasn’t sure if I could engage, but unlike, well, Prometheus, uh, American Prometheus wasn’t fully epistolary, but I thought there would be. When I read that, that was the format of Dracula, I thought, oh, is it, is it gonna be similar? But it, it wasn’t at all like I, he, he used this format in such a beautiful way and I was drawn into it and.

[01:33:54] Donna: Wanted to know, like some of the things we listen to, I listen, I try to keep up, you know, [01:34:00] with things and make sure I’m on point with things. But the book doesn’t grab me. This one grabbed me. And so I would give it probably a 9 6, 5, 6. I mean, I, I loved it. Uh, I agree that there were some slow parts. Um, I wondered how Tim has alluded to it, and Josiah just alluded to it, how that last four hours would work Now it developed the characters and it developed Lucy, I mean, it developed Mina into this.

[01:34:36] Donna: Just amazing woman that you would aspire to be. But you know, uh, I love the language. I love the Victorian language. Um, that was very captivating to me. Uh, it, this is a very kind of a stressful time in my work right now, this time of years. Very stressful. So that gave me some breath. It gave me some [01:35:00] breathing room to hear this different.

[01:35:03] Donna: I don’t know, it just took me out of things and I loved that. Um, and then as we’ve talked about a couple of different times, the character, uh, that he created of Mina was just unbelievable. Her faithfulness to God, her faithfulness to Jonathan, her determination, even after the count had gotten her, that was.

[01:35:30] Donna: Crafted. I mean, it was a, it was crafted masterfully and I loved it. So, uh, the movies we watched are pretty much in line with what Josiah was saying. I, um, I did love the 77. Uh, that was fun to watch and see a lot of, even lines straight from the novel they would, he would use. So I thought that was pretty cool.

[01:35:54] Donna: Um, uh, to know that there was [01:36:00] conflict off screen with the Lagosi film. It was kind of heartbreaking because it could have been more. Um, but yeah, this was, I’ve, I’ve enjoyed doing this. I love looking into the lore of the whole thing as well as the, the pieces that we watched and what we read. So, 

[01:36:19] Rebekah: uh, I thought it’s hard.

[01:36:22] Rebekah: I had a really hard time with the book. Slow pacing for me is like. It’s one of the hardest things that I face in getting myself to read more, like if it in continuing a book. So I really struggled. I was planning on reading the Kindle version and the last few weeks have been insanely busy. So I listened to the audio book, which takes me three times longer than reading on Kindle.

[01:36:44] Rebekah: And I was like, when is something going to actually happen? Like I was, I struggled a lot, so I’m going, because it is such a classic and it is really well done. The book itself and the [01:37:00] story is incredible. I will still give the book a six and a half outta 10, but I like, could not like, it was so hard to force myself, but I like, loved the story.

[01:37:10] Rebekah: It was just like the pacing was like, oh my gosh. So I really struggled with that. Um, I would probably give the Coppola a film that I watched, like, um, a. Probably the same rating, like six and a half outta 10. I thought it was really good for what it was. It was not really my cup of tea. And there were a few things in it that I was like, I had pretty major, like, why did you make the story that way?

[01:37:33] Rebekah: Um, issues with, uh, Renfield for me is like a eight and a half outta 10. I love it. I have a blast with it. Whatever. So I think in general, like, I think this is such an interesting story. I think something I noticed, um, that I wanted to even point out in this section is like the, the addition of like the love story with Dracula and these things.

[01:37:56] Rebekah: I think a lot of that comes from modern filmmaking. Wants to [01:38:00] give people, especially villains motivation, even if they’re still villains. Like they have to have a motivation. And I think the book was so cleanly, like he’s a vampire and his motivation is, I want to suck your blood. You know, like he, he wants blood, like he wants to.

[01:38:17] Rebekah: He wants to live and like, he’s evil. He’s soulless. And so that’s it. Like, like Renfield didn’t have to be someone he had met. It could just be somebody that he realized he could prey on. Like, and so I think it was interesting that part of the book was really interesting to me. I understand why they try to add more motivation on screen and I get why, and you know, I don’t have a problem with that in its, you know, at its core.

[01:38:44] Rebekah: But I do think that it was an interesting factor that like the book just didn’t do that. And I thought it was kind of a, that part was very fresh for me and, and felt nice. So, yeah. 

[01:38:55] Tim: Well I would probably give the book, um, a nine. I [01:39:00] really enjoyed it. I liked the way that the, that it read. I, I enjoyed the pacing and things like that.

[01:39:05] Tim: I did struggle with the part where it. Was still four hours from the end, and I thought, oh, well that sounds like the chapter before the end. Um, uh, that was rough. Um, I, I appreciated the 77 movie. I think the scenes in it are probably a little less memorable. Um, you know, if they stick in your memory maybe.

[01:39:29] Tim: Um, but I would, I would probably give it, give it a, a seven and a half, uh, or so, something like that. I realized as we were doing this that I probably grew up on the Christopher Lee, um, vampire on Dracula and Frank Ella, who that one was from 79. So those are probably the ones that I was actually familiar with as a child and a young adult.

[01:39:53] Tim: Um, I enjoyed Renfield. I thought it was a, I thought it was a wonderful [01:40:00] concept. Uh, I en I enjoyed that. The Laci film. I’m glad that I saw it. Um, but it, it is not all the things that I expected it to be because for me it almost seemed to be missing some important elements. Um, so I would proba I would probably give it a five for what it is.

[01:40:24] Tim: And then, um, one of the other ones that I watched, uh, I would probably, I’d probably give them a five. I, I realized that, uh, Coppola, Coppola would probably get a six visually, but I have a probably real problem with the sensual nature of it. And I honestly think that most of the films that have followed it are trying to see if they can ramp that up.

[01:40:54] Donna: Can we, can we go farther? Yeah. 

[01:40:55] Tim: Let’s make that worse. Which is, um. It is, it is definitely [01:41:00] unfortunate. So 

[01:41:00] Donna: for a c, for such a Christian 

[01:41:03] Tim: Yeah. 

[01:41:03] Donna: Principle, 

[01:41:04] Tim: like Josiah said, 

[01:41:05] Donna: yeah, 

[01:41:05] Tim: there’s, it is very overtly Christian. The only things that can take care of Dracula are these Christian symbols and they have to be holy.

[01:41:16] Tim: They can’t simply be, um, secularized or whatever. A wooden stake is not good enough. You have to believe, blah, blah, blah. 

[01:41:24] Josiah: You know, I actually had to ask chat GPT in my research. I just had the thought in my head, wait, how does Dracula live in Carfax Abbey? It’s an Abbey. But it’s, then I was reminded chat and I went back to the chapter as well, uh, to confirm that it had specifically been deconsecrated.

[01:41:46] Josiah: The Abey, uh, Bram Stoker describes how, yeah, it used to be an abbey, but for like hundred for a long time now, it was specifically de who fied by the church. 

[01:41:59] Tim: Uh, we’ve seen, [01:42:00] we’ve seen some shows recently that, that have talked about that this used to be blah, blah, blah, Catholic church or whatever, but it has been how, whatever word they use, and so they do strange things there.

[01:42:14] Rebekah: Nice. Well, I think that just about does it. If you had fun today, please leave us a five star rating or review. We also have a Patreon. If you wanna join our Discord, um, you’ll need to find us on Patreon first. Uh, there’s a link to the Patreon in the description. Uh, we will do a quick update on the new movie in our review of it that comes out in early 2026 and drop that in our discord, uh, for subscribers only.

[01:42:42] Rebekah: Uh, Patreon is also a great way to get updated on new episodes. If you wanna sign up even as a free user, you’ll be able to set that up for notifications or emails to come through and we drop new stuff. So we’d love to have you join us there. You can also, uh, enjoy having some fun with us on social media.

[01:42:58] Rebekah: We’ve been doing a lot of really fun stuff. [01:43:00] Thanks to mom for all of your hard work there. Follow us at book is Better Pod on basically all the major platforms, uh, and. Yeah, by the time you hear this, we will have gone to Universal and gotten to meet Dracula, go to see Dos Steakhouse, which is a steakhouse themed after him and, uh, go on a ride that’s themed after one of the things he does.

[01:43:23] Rebekah: So keep an eye out on our social media and, uh, until next time, I want to suck your blood gaga. 

[01:43:33] Don’t 

[01:43:33] Rebekah: throw me in a bag 

[01:43:34] Josiah: to the brides of, 

[01:43:37] Rebekah: wow.

[01:43:54] Rebekah: Wow. That was truly a beautiful summary. I just. 

[01:43:58] Josiah: Thank you. 

[01:43:58] Rebekah: You are. That’s [01:44:00] great. You should be an author. 

[01:44:02] Josiah: Oh, 

[01:44:03] Rebekah: you should write, I should 

[01:44:04] Josiah: write something about Dracula. 

[01:44:05] Rebekah: You should write plays. You should continue even.